borg.com Hall of Fame — 2014 inductees

After climbing over our 1,000th daily post at borg.com this week, it’s time to update the borg.com Hall of Fame, with borg in genre fiction from past, present, and future, and from all media. Click here for our “About” page if you need a refresher on what makes a borg a borg.

Some of these more than two dozen borg inductees were overlooked in our initial list. A few may or may not be borg, depending on your point of view. Robots or androids that look perfectly human, for example, that have organic looking material but may not have actual living tissue are not technically cyborgs. But if Cylons are borg, we think most of the characters below should be considered borg, too.

So here is Round 2, the 2014 borg.com Hall of Fame honorees, in no particular order:

Mike Power, the Atomic Man from the 1970s. We hope he shows up again in this year’s The Six Million Dollar Man, Season 6, from Dynamite Comics.

In the 2003 animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it was revealed the Rat King was once the Slayer, a bio-mechanical super soldier prototype.

From Dark Horse Comics’ 2014 comic book series, we have Vandroid. Chuck Carducci is a mechanic. Chuck is also an android created by Chuck, but does he have any humanity? This one is just out so we’ll know for sure soon whether Vandroid is a borg or not.

From the low-budget sci-fi B-movie, we reviewed Manborghere at borg.com back in 2013.

From the classic fantasy movie The Dark Crystal, it’sSkekTek the Skeksis scientist who had multiple bionic parts.

From 2013’s new TV series Almost Human, Karl Urban’s detective John Kennex (who has a cybernetic leg) is a borg, but is his partner, Michael Ealy’s out-dated android Dorian? The newer model police officers appear to be androids only, but is there any organic part, any living tissue, in Dorian?

Almost Human features a society full of androids (including the prostitute, above)–some with illegally-trafficked actual human skin–real skin, which, of course, makes them borg. We don’t know if Dorian has any organic material yet.

From the Doctor Who episode “A Town Called Mercy,” the cybernetic Gunslinger.

From the title character of the Joe Benitez comic book steampunk series, the borg survivor of a killer’s experiments, the beautiful Lady Mechanika.

In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, once she was taken over by the V’ger probe, Ilia became a computer controlled cyborg, yet some of her Deltan “humanity” remained.

One series of low-budget films featured borg, first Jean-Claude van Damme’s Cyborg, where the cyborg isn’t van Damme’s character, but a woman named Pearl Prophet.

And here is the late Jack Palance’s cyborg Mercy, and Angelina Jolie’s first starring role as borg Cash Reese in Cyborg 2. The second sequel Cyborg 3: The Recycler has Khrystyne Haje replacing Angelina Jolie.

In Back to the Future II, Griff Tannen was a descendant of Biff, who had bionic implants that made odd sounds whenever he moved.

Movies in 2014 featured plenty of borgs. Matt Damon played the cyborg Max in Elysium.

And Tom Cruise played Jack, and Andrea Riseborough played Vika in Oblivion. Borgs or droids? They were called “clones,” so we think that requires them to be organic, therefore, borg.

And now we have a new Alex Murphy in 2014’s brilliant remake of the ultimate borg story, RoboCop.

Academy Award winner Denzel Washington played Lt. Parker Barnes from the film Virtuosity.

From the Marvel Comics universe, Rom the Space Knight was often referred to as a cyborg in the series of the same name.

Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 and the other supersoldiers from the Halo series were borgs. Also, Captain Jacob Keyes and Fleet Admiral Lord Terrence Hood had bionic parts.

The comic book series Concrete features a man whose brain is placed in a stone body by aliens, a very primitive way of going borg.

Renée Soutendijk played Eve VIII, referred to as a cyborg in Eve of Destruction, yet she seems to be an android who taps into her human creator’s memories, like the android Chuck in Vandroid. Borg or not a borg?

What about all those other female androids, or fembots, which look so human? We don’t really know if any have organic material, otherwise we’d include several fembots and similar characters, and we’ll feature several of them (and there are a surprising number of them in genre fiction) in an upcoming article at borg.com.

So that’s it for now. We’ve added these to the borg.com Hall of Fame at the “Know your borg” link on our home page. Let us know if you find any others we should add next time around.